Leaving her “ReidOut” program on MSNBC after it was canceled in preparation for MSNBC’s sale by parent company Comcast, Joy Reid followed up on her tear-filled commentary on the cancellation of her largely unwatched program with an angry rant in which she moaned about the supposed rise of “fascism” in America.
As background, Reid, crying while trying to hold back her tears on a Zoom meeting after her show was canceled, declared that her “show had value.” Further, she bemoaned the decision but said she would refuse to apologize for having gone “hard” on issues like supporting Black Lives Matter, siding with even illegal immigrants, championing the 1619 Project, and opposing Trump.
Bizarrely, she then claimed that God supports those often-communist projects, saying, “I am not sorry I stood up for those things because those things are of God.” She added, “And you know, I’m a church girl too, and those are the things that I was taught were of God. So I’m not sorry. I’m just proud of my show.”
In any case, beginning her show on Monday, Reid followed those tears up by echoing her message about her supposedly being ready to fight back against “fascism,” saying, “We begin tonight with what I think is the question; when you are in the midst of a crisis and specifically a crisis of democracy: How do you resist– when fascism isn’t just coming, It’s already here? So, what, if anything, can you do about it?”
Continuing, she declared that she was, in her berserk rants on MSNBC, helping people learn from history about how to fight fascism. She said, “For one thing, you can try to learn from history, from what people in this situation, in countries around the world and in America have done before. As my friend Rachel Maddow always says, history is here to help.”
She then ranted about the largely mythical work of Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad and “taking up arms during the Civil War,” and went on to champion the supposed resistance exhibited by “the women’s movement and the worker’s rights movement and the Stonewall gay rights movement.”
She said that all of those examples have “been versions of the fight to make this a free country for everyone and to have a true multiracial democracy, and that is history’s most important lesson, right? That the most important thing — the first rule — is to fight back, to never stop resisting.”
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She then said, “Do not obey in advance, as Tim Snyder put it, do not take the knee, to throw in a Game of Thrones reference, even if it’s scary or uncomfortable or inconvenient. Just keep saying no or finding creative ways to say no in small ways and large. Medgar Evers said ‘Do not shop where they will not employ you.’ Dr King championed the Montgomery bus boycotts to become the leader of the civil rights movement.”
She added, “The labor rights movement shut down factories and hobbled industries to win the 40-hour work week that you enjoy right now, and more recently, to ensure the right of workers to work from home during COVID. People have marched against the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq and against the decimation of Gaza using our tax dollars. You don’t always win every battle, but the whole thing is about resisting.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video